Parks+protesters=problems

Building managers wrestling with security issues

FILE- In this Nov. 15, 2011 file photo, police officers disperse Occupy Wall Street protesters near the encampment at Zuccotti Park in New York. A survey by the Associated Press shows that since the protests began, the Occupy Wall Street protests have cost local taxpayers at least $13 million in the 18 cities with active protests. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
— AP

FILE- In this Nov. 15, 2011 file photo, police officers disperse Occupy Wall Street protesters near the encampment at Zuccotti Park in New York. A survey by the Associated Press shows that since the protests began, the Occupy Wall Street protests have cost local taxpayers at least $13 million in the 18 cities with active protests. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
/ AP

As Ralph Blasi, Brookfield Properties' national director of security, tells it, his team was doing its job of litter control, plant trimming and other perfunctory chores at the company's Zuccotti Park in New York City when the Occupy Wall Street protesters arrived Sept. 17, 2011.

"This is one of my least-favorite subjects to talk about," Blasi told a workshop at the recent convention in San Diego of Building Owners and Managers Association International. "It was an experience that was quite annoying, but also expensive."

Like $5 million expensive two months later, when the protesters were forced out.

Blasi was joined by Mark Anderson, national security liaison for the Jones Lang LaSalle brokerage and management company, and Jeff Shearman, senior risk engineering consultant for Zurich Risk Engineering on a panel, provocatively titled, "Protecting Properties from Protests in an Age of Civil Demonstrations."

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Since the days of "People's Park" in Berkeley in the 1960s and at virtually every other major news-making event since then, parks have become places for protest.

While public parks and spaces are traditionally publicly owned and and managed by park rangers, many are owned, maintained and managed by private companies. And the rules aren't necessarily the same at these private spaces.

And that difference, as the panel explained to workshop attendees, requires contingency plans when the Occupy crowd shows up.

"It's only 33,000 square feet," Blasi said of Zuccotti Park. "But it was enough to receive global attention during the occupation. We were caught between the city of New York and the media on how to handle this situation."

Developed by the original builders of adjacent the One Liberty Plaza office tower at 165 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, the former Liberty Square was renamed for Brookfield's chairman John E. Zuccotti, a former city planning commissioner, after an $8 renovation from damage associated with the September 2001 terrorist attacks just one block away at the World Trade Center twin towers.

What Blasi was referring to was the set of zoning and design regulations applied to privately owned but publicly accessible parks and plazas. More than 500 such spaces in New York are required to be open 24 hours a day but be managed and patrolled by the private property owners.

These spaces exist in New York, and San Diego as well, because cities routinely allow bigger developments as long as builders give something back, such as affordable housing, public art or a public park and plaza.

(San Diego Mayor Bob Filner did virtually the same thing recently, when he allowed a housing project to go forward once the developers donated $100,000 for a city project.)

Virtually every fountain, hardscape plaza and sculpture in business blocks, both downtown and in commercial zones, is privately owned and maintained but freely accessible to the public, who usually are unaware they are stepping onto private property in what otherwise appears to be a public space.

In New York, Blasi said, his security personnel did not have the police's powers of arrest and don't have the power to arrest and shoot lawbreakers, and the city police did not believe they had the power to enter this private space. During the Zuccotti crisis, Blasi said he dreamed of turning on fire hydrants, letting loose German shepherds and deploying blow torches.